Content marketing is a very important strategy for any business, especially ones that work online. Content marketing focuses on the creation, publication and distribution of online content, with the purpose of reaching a target audience, converting them to customers. But how do you get content marketing right?
Set Clear Goals
One of the best marketing tips is to set clear goals. There’s so many options for making content that it can be overwhelming. With options from blog posts and Instagram post to ebooks and podcasts, where do you start?
Set a clear, measurable goal for each piece of content to help you make the right choice. For example, if you’re working with blogs, you can’t just right the content. Identify a target audience and work out the content will serve. Use analytics to make sure the content finds the right people. How does the content tie back to your business? You need to point those people back to your company and your services.
Understand The Buyer’s Journey
A good content marketing strategy needs to engage the reader at any stage of the buying journey. While content is mostly used to attract new visitors to your company website, it also needs to do double duty to convince a customer to make a purchase. Good content keeps existing customers loyal as well as attracting new ones.
Identify what’s causing customers to not purchase and create content to address that. For example, are customers seeing your product as too complicated? Content from your sales team such as simple instructional videos can help to convince customers otherwise.
Track Performance With Analytics
Your content should be converting viewers into customers. Analytics is the best way to track how this is working. Monitor and report on the numbers to see what’s working and what isn’t, and what you can improve.
As well as traffic, look at conversion rates. For example, if your blog only gets 1000 readers , but your Instagram has 7000 followers, it might seem that Instagram is more successful for you. However, if the blog has a conversion rate of 7%, while Instagram only has 0.5%, this shows that your blog is doing a better job of converting sales, and shouldn’t be ignored.
Paying attention to the analytics helps you to improve your strategy moving forward. For example, if the numbers show that you bring in more readers on blog posts about SEO, then you know to generate more content on that theme later on, increasing traffic even more.
Keep Content Up To Date
Don’t ignore old content. Keep it up to date and relevant to search engines. Exclude the year in your URL when optimising your content. Instead, include the year in the title of your content. Revisit the content each year to update the title tag, meta description and content itself. Don’t change your URL when you do this so you don’t break any existing backlinks or have to create redirects. Up to date content can continue to rank and draw in new customers.
Decaying content is something you have to watch out for, too, as the last thing you need is to have a bunch of dead articles on your website that aren’t bringing in the traffic. You need to do what you can to revamp, restyle and reshare old content so that it can bring in the traffic you need. You want your content to mean something, and it can only mean something if it’s lively and wanted by your audience.
